ebay vs ebey warning

[Grant]

I have some things posted on ebay.com

I got an e-mail inquiry today from <member@ebey.com> that sounded like he never really read my item description. The e-mail was too vague and general.

In my initial attempt to respond, ebay warned me this site was not Kosher. I cancelled the response. Doing a google search revealed this e-mail address was linked to someone trying to "Phish" my account for personal information, etc. Sometime ago I had a funny inquiry, and in my response, I was redirected to another site, called ebay.com, that asked me to log in (again) with my account and password. This, too, is not really ebay but another phishing attempt.

Unfortunately, there's always someone trying to wreck it for the rest of us.

Grant
Jackson, MO

[honeyman46408]

I get emails wanting me to update my ebay account & my paypal and I don`t have a paypal :(

[BjornBee]

Never respond to an ebay message on your regular email message board. Any real message will be also be on your ebay account message board. Always respond by logging into your ebay account and then pulling up your messages from the ebay site. You will notice many of these bogus messages are not on your ebay message board. This way you know for sure if they are fake or legit.

[Hobie]

I've gotten the ebay/paypal notices to an email address that is not connected with mine. Just for kicks, I followed the link, and typed in garbage for username and password... and it "logged me in"! It then proceeded to ask for credit card info. Unfortunately, it would not accept me typing "Youlousycheaters" in the credit card number space.

[notaclue]

Someone got into my account a couple years ago and I took quite a while to get it straightened out. Finally had to go through the site and get a live person to help me. Found a phisher about a week later. At that time the email I was getting opened automatically. I copied the messeges I got after that and emailed them to ebay fraud. New provider and I can now screen email and just block the sender or delete the email. Have had only an occasional phisher since then. But I started doing what Bjornbee said and it works just as well. Since I'm on ebay often enough as it is, it's no problem to check it out.

[carbide]

Last year I bid on a pop-up camper for sale on eBay by a local car dealer. Unfortunately I was outbid. The next day I received an email for a "second chance" offer from the dealership working through eBay. The offer stated that the winning bidder had been unable to post the required $500 deposit for the trailer and if I was still interested I could have the trailer for the amount of my last bid. All I needed to do was post the deposit through my paypal account and the trailer would be mine.

Fortunatley for me the dealership was only a couple of miles away from my home so I drove over after work that evening to deliver the deposit in person and arrange for the payment of the balance owed. When I got there the manager explained to me that the winning bidder had driven off the lot with the trailer no more than a half hour beforehand. I went from being elated at having a second chance at the trailer, to being depressed at losing the trailer for a second time, to being totally enraged for being almost duped into giving a crook $500 of my hard earned money. If the dealership had not been so close to me, I probably would have sent the $500 via paypal to this crook.

Not long after this incident eBay started the practice of hiding the identity of bidders on higher priced items . Now instead of your username being shown as a bidder on an item, they use simply bidder1, bidder2, bidder3, etc. I'm sure that even this practice won't stop all of the crooks out there from getting to you, but I believe that it helps some.

The moral of the story is: Be sure who you are dealing with when online and as BjornBee stated above, make sure that any messages you receive come through the eBay message center.

[Grant]

Looking back over my last ebay transactions, the real test of integrity came with those e-mails that came through my ebay account, not my e-mail account that was linked to my ebay account.

Great information! Thanks,

Grant
Jackson, MO http://www.25hives.homestead.com

[berkshire bee]

I once bid on an "old" metal bender that supposedly came out of a blacksmith shop. There was a picture and everything. I won the bid and a week later got a notice from harbor freight that my bender was on back order. The guy who sold it was advertising it as an old heavy duty tool, then having harbor freight drop ship one of those new cheap pcs of junk. It took me a few weeks of contacting the seller, reporting his misrepresentation to ebay and giving negative feedback, but I finally got my money back. On the other hand out of a hundred or so transactions buying and selling most have been fine.

[notaclue]

I figure that if I lose the bid I have moved on. I was offerred a second chance once and deleted the email. May or may not have been a scam, I don't know, but I may have gotten lucky. It was just an Avalon Hill game, but that's the way the ball bounces sometimes.

[Jack Johnson]

Here is what was written in this mornings paper about spoofs. The guy pleaded guilty, but what do you think he will get from the law?

Taken from the Ottawa Citizen Newspaper 10 Nov 07

MAN PLEADS GUILTY IN PAYPAL "BOT" ATTACK

A California man agreed to plead guilty to infecting as many as 250,000 personal computers with software used to steal users names ansd passwords for eBay Inc.'s PayPal online service. John Schiefer,26, of Los Angeles will admit to four felony counts, including accessing protected computers to conduct fraud, according to a statement yesterday by the attorney's office in Los Angeles. He faces as much as 60 years in prison and a fine of $1.75 million, according to the statement. Mr Schiefer is the first person to be charged under wiretapping law for operating a "Botnet", an army of computers compromised without the owners knowledge.
End Quote:

It's about time that they caught somebody working these spoofs. With the technology we have today they really should be able to catch a lot more.

This was just a small blurb in our paper here and may not be followed up with the results of the court. If any of you see something further it would be interesting if you could post the results.

Jack